Unwanted electrical arcs have been identified as a major cause of fires in residential and commercial electrical wiring as well as in electrical power distribution systems for aircraft and other vehicles. An electrical arc fault is defined as electrical current through a gas in a broken or disconnected circuit. The disconnected circuit can be between two deteriorated conductors, between one deteriorated conductor and ground plane (parallel arc) or between adjacent ends of a conductor (series arc). Arc fault conditions may be attributed to a variety of causes, such as damage to wiring, insulation, or contacts due to age, heat, chemical erosion, bending stress, etc.
Although conventional short circuit and overcurrent protection techniques, which typically rely on mechanical circuit breakers to interrupt circuit flow under certain conditions, react to some arc faults, they offer little protection for small arcing events below the trip curves of the standard circuit breakers. The concern is that even small arcs can develop high temperatures and cause serious damage to adjacent wiring. Furthermore, although ground-fault circuit interrupters (GFCls) have been widely used in buildings to protect against even low-current line-to-ground arc faults, GFCls do not protect against other types of arc faults and have limited applicability. For this reason, more complex techniques, including electrical-based arc fault circuit interrupters, have been proposed for use in residential and commercial buildings to detect and react to low current arc faults while minimizing unwanted trips (“nuisance trips”) and should be immune to load switching conditions, bus transfers, electromagnetic interference (EMI), etc.
Particularly in aerospace power distribution systems, there has been a shift from predominantly mechanical or electromechanical control to predominantly electronic and computer-based control. This shift has resulted in advanced power distribution controllers, such as Electric Load Management Centers (ELMCs) and the use of solid state switching control (SSPC) technology, which is a relative newcomer in aerospace power distribution systems. Current SSPC technology, which typically performs only short circuit and overload protection for the attached circuitry, does not provide adequate protection against parallel or series arc faults and, thus, does not provide adequate protection against arc faults occurring downstream of the SSPC-fed circuitry to load. Arc signature based fault protection would have drawbacks if implemented in an SSPC based electrical power distribution environment because the detection algorithm would require complex measures to avoid nuisance trips under various load conditions, switching conditions, etc.